Lord Jim Joseph Conrad (epub ebook reader .txt) 📖

the dark lane or, anchored, floated motionless with a loud ripple. That night there was much paddling in a canoe and walking at his master’s heels for Tamb’ Itam: up and down the street they tramped, where the fires were burning, inland on the outskirts of the town where small parties of men kept guard in the fields. Tuan Jim gave his orders and was obeyed. Last of all they went to the Rajah’s stockade, which a detachment of Jim’s people manned on that night. The old Rajah had fled early in the morning with most of his women to a small house he had near a jungle village on a tributary stream. Kassim, left behind, had attended the council with his air of diligent activity to explain away the diplomacy of the day before. He was considerably cold-shouldered, but managed to preserve his smiling, quiet alertness, and professed himself highly delighted when Jim told him sternly that he proposed to occupy the stockade on that night with his own men. After the council broke up he was heard outside accosting this and that departing chief, and speaking in a loud, gratified tone of the Rajah’s property being protected in the Rajah’s absence.

“About ten or so Jim’s men marched in. The stockade commanded the mouth of the creek, and Jim meant to remain there till Brown had passed below. A small fire was lit on the flat, grassy point outside the wall of stakes, and Tamb’ Itam placed a little folding-stool for his master. Jim told him to try and sleep. Tamb’ Itam got a mat and lay down a little way off; but he could not sleep, though he knew he had to go on an important journey before the night was out. His master walked to and fro before the fire with bowed head and with his hands behind his back. His face was sad. Whenever his master approached him Tamb’ Itam pretended to sleep, not wishing his master to know he had been watched. At last his master stood still, looking down on him as he lay, and said softly, ‘It is time.’

“Tamb’ Itam arose directly and made his preparations. His mission was to go down the river, preceding Brown’s boat by an hour or more, to tell Dain Waris finally and formally that the whites were to be allowed to pass out unmolested. Jim would not trust anybody else with that service. Before starting, Tamb’ Itam, more as a matter of form (since his position about Jim made him perfectly known), asked for a token. ‘Because, Tuan,’ he said, ‘the message is important, and these are thy very words I carry.’ His master first put his hand into one pocket, then into another, and finally took off his forefinger Stein’s silver ring, which he habitually wore, and gave it to Tamb’ Itam. When Tamb’ Itam left on his mission, Brown’s camp on the knoll was dark but for a single small glow shining through the branches of one of the trees the white men had cut down.

“Early in the evening Brown had received from Jim a folded piece of paper on which was written, ‘You get the clear road. Start as soon as your boat floats on the morning tide. Let your men be careful. The bushes on both sides of the creek and the stockade at the mouth are full of well-armed men. You would have no chance, but I don’t believe you want bloodshed.’ Brown read it, tore the paper into small pieces, and, turning to Cornelius, who had brought it, said jeeringly, ‘Goodbye, my excellent friend.’ Cornelius had been in the fort, and had been sneaking around Jim’s house during the afternoon. Jim chose him to carry the note because he could speak English, was known to Brown, and was not likely to be shot by some nervous mistake of one of the men as a Malay, approaching in the dusk, perhaps might have been.

“Cornelius didn’t go away after delivering the paper. Brown was sitting up over a tiny fire; all the others were lying down. ‘I could tell you something you would like to know,’ Cornelius mumbled crossly. Brown paid no attention. ‘You did not kill him,’ went on the other, ‘and what do you get for it? You might have had money from the Rajah, besides the loot of all the Bugis houses, and now you get nothing.’ ‘You had better clear out from here,’ growled Brown, without even looking at him. But Cornelius let himself drop by his side and began to whisper very fast, touching his elbow from time to time. What he had to say made Brown sit up at first, with a curse. He had simply informed him of Dain Waris’s armed party down the river. At first Brown saw himself completely sold and betrayed, but a moment’s reflection convinced him that there could be no treachery intended. He said nothing, and after a while Cornelius remarked, in a tone of complete indifference, that there was another way out of the river which he knew very well. ‘A good thing to know, too,’ said Brown, pricking up his ears; and Cornelius began to talk of what went on in town and repeated all that had been said in council, gossiping in an even undertone at Brown’s ear as you talk amongst sleeping men you do not wish to wake. ‘He thinks he has made me harmless, does he?’ mumbled Brown very low.⁠ ⁠… ‘Yes. He is a fool. A little child. He came here and robbed me,’ droned on Cornelius, ‘and he made all the people believe him. But if something happened that they did not believe him any more, where would he be? And the Bugis Dain who is waiting for you down the river there, captain, is the very man who chased you up here when you first came.’ Brown observed nonchalantly that it would be just as well to avoid him, and with the same